Semantic-Driven Goal-Oriented Development of AAL Environments

Abstract

In recent years, a multitude of assistive technologies have been devised to enhance people's capabilities by means of environments that are adaptive, sensitive and responsive to human needs. Following this approach, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies are developed to provide support especially to elderly people for prevention and recognition of medical threats, and improvement of well-being. Towards this direction, the aim of this paper is to introduce the principles of a goal-oriented methodology devoted to support system designers in the development of AAL environments. In the methodology, AAL requirements are elicited, analysed and then formally represented in an ontology, which serves as a collaboratively built knowledge base. Here, high-level goals are described in terms of subgoals and tasks, that are then linked to corresponding measures and devices. On its top, logic-based reasoning functionalities provide means to retrieve explicit and hidden knowledge, as we show in two typical applications of the methodology, namely the development from scratch of an AAL environment starting from a set of high-level user requirements and the redesign of an existing implementation according to changed requirements.